Texas offense gets going in win over Red Raiders

Saturday

Nov 1, 2014 at 10:33 PM

Terry Greenberg

After one quarter, the Texas Longhorns had 26 yards in total offense.

"Offensively, it's going to take us awhile to get going. It's going to take us two, three drives to really get going," said first-year Texas coach Charlie Strong after the Longhorns beat Texas Tech 34-13 Saturday night at Jones AT&T Stadium.

Texas outscored the Red Raiders 31-7 over the final three quarters and finished with 469 yards of total offense. Malcolm Brown became the first Longhorn this season to rush for more than a hundred yards, with 116 on 22 carries. Johnathan Gray had 83 yards on 16 carries.

As they got the offense going, the Longhorn defense delivered a crucial blow to Tech's offense when Quandre Diggs knocked Tech quarterback Patrick Mahomes out of the game in the second quarter.

"It was a good hit. I did something to get my team wired up. Anytime you get the ball back for the offense in great field position it's a great feeling," said Diggs.

Strong said: "I think that got us going … it was really a good, clean hit. I don't like to see an injury to any player, whether it's mine or someone else's, but it was just a good, clean hit and he did kind of get everyone going."

On offense, Strong said his team didn't make any adjustments after the poor first quarter, they just executed. "We weren't executing in the first quarter," he said. "We always hurt ourselves, it's nothing anyone else does." "You look at the formation and everything they gave to us on our offense; we wanted to be physical today," said Strong, who explained how Texas used a fullback and one or two tight ends at times to give Tech's defense different looks.

Strong said he excited to have his team bounce back after getting shut out at Kansas State last week, saying he's not always sure which Longhorn team shows up each week.

"I told them before the game, what team is it that shows up today, is it going to be a team that plays with a lot of passion, a lot of confidence, a team that has a lot of pride and just understands what we gotta get done," he said.

Strong said he was pleased how his team responded in front of a full house in Lubbock.

"This was an unbelievable crowd here today. Just to come into this environment, it's going to be a hostile environment. They saw that in pregame warmups. The tone was already set for this game. I said we're going to have to play great defense to take this crowd out of the game," he said.

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